by ·Comments Off on The Parallax View (1974, Alan Pakula)

Turns out it’s a 4th of July movie (which I watched on the 6th).

Months after a senator is shot by waiters at a Space Needle party, a reporter at the scene tells colleague Warren Beatty that witnesses are being killed. Warren goes rogue, raises hell with a small-town sheriff’s department and comes away with some papers from an organization that recruits assassins. He goes undercover calling himself Harry Nilsson, gets a crazy guy to fill out the admission forms for him, and convinces the parallax group he’s crazy enough to kill for them. I didn’t follow all the twists when he saved a flight full of people from a bombing, but the company is onto him afterwards, sending his editor a heart attack sandwich then framing Warren for the climactic assassination.

Alan “The Count” Pakula was the 70’s conspiracy thriller guy, making this between Klute and All the President’s Men. The screenwriters also did Three Days of the Condor (sure) and The Money Pit (what) with uncredited work by the late Robert Towne. They got a Taking of Pelham hijacker in this, a Stepford wife, and a Hitchcock actor.

Proof that it’s a 1970s movie:

by ·Comments Off on Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974, Shuji Terayama)

If I hadn’t known who Terayama was, by the end of this movie I’d say “ohh, he comes from the experimental theater scene doesn’t he?”

Shin-chan is a whitefaced boy whose family’s clock is ringing constantly but they won’t take it off the wall to get repaired. After forty minutes, when the kid is running away with the married neighbor he’s crushing on, the film-in-a-film ends and its director says he’s having creative problems finishing it. Now in the present day, talking about dreams and fiction (Borges comes up) and time travel paradoxes, he re-remembers his childhood more realistically, including a flashback-in-a-flashback of the neighbor’s childhood.

“I’ve been betrayed by my own self from 20 years ago. Now I’ll have to kill mother on my own”

“My mother and I are merely characters that I’ve invented – because it’s only a film.”

by ·Comments Off on “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen (1974, Michael Snow)

An avant-garde sketch comedy omnibus, eyewash color field flashes between segments. My dream is to make a new version of this that isn’t annoying to watch, divide the four hours into eight episodes, and sell it to Criterion Channel as an original series.

Snow has called it a musical comedy, a true “talking picture” in 25 episodes. Most attempts at describing it quote his press notes: “Via the eyes and ears it is a composition aimed at exciting the two halves of the brain into recognition.”

Rosenbaum:

In parts, I find it intriguing; in toto, indigestible. Encyclopedias are useful things to have around, but who wants to plough through from A to Z in a single sitting?

The Episodes (incomplete):

1. guy (Snow) making bird sounds from three angles

Out-of-focus FOCUS card that seems designed to get audiences mad at the projectionist, woman speaks about Rameau on soundtrack.

Credits are read aloud – hey, Chantal is in this. So many credits, some of them fake.

6: Office ventriloquism – these are Jonas Mekas, Marlene Arvan, Harry Gant, and the voice of Tony Janneti.

7: Conversation(?) on an airplane with the camera turned sideways and gradually rotating, cutting after each line, Abbott and Costello academia. This goes on eternally but at least it’s constantly mutating, and the chapter headings (different numbers, usually with a voice announcing “four”) make me chuckle. Gradually pulls out revealing more of its artifice, the lighting, then the director’s script prompts.

8: someone’s hands (Snow’s) play a kitchen sink like a drum (with sink/synch sound), filling it with water to hear the pitch change.

9: A guy reads nonsense words into camera, the picture glitching on each syllable. I think it’s messing with us by dropping in some real words. He takes questions at the end.

10: Four-person table read among cacophony from different playback devices, primarily piano music by Rameau. They start talking in sync with their previously-filmed selves, sometimes their voices cut out, sometimes you have to turn down the TV volume because the cacophony gets too intense. This was Deborah Dobski, Carol Friedlander, Barry Gerson, Babette Mangolte. I didn’t skip ahead during this part, I think I might be immune to annoyance.

11: short one, visual of people riding a bus while voiceover talks about our man-machine future.

12: a group converses in a possibly made-up language while one of them films us watching… aha it was reverse-speak since the scene then plays backwards and flipped L-R with the sound reversed, but due to the sound quality I still can’t tell if they’re speaking English words. One of the two segments with professional actors, the other being #20.

13: A four-person sync-sound mockery in front of a museum diorama… on the soundtrack they’re reading each line all together, while on the visual one of them fake-lip-flaps a repeated pattern, until the film devolves into a stuttering flicker-horror. This one gets so loopy that it’s hard to tell if we’ve reached the between-scenes eyewash or if the scene has reached the limits of pure love and light.

14: Nude couple pissing into mic’d-up buckets, short segment.

15: Long one with a group in a fancy room, first making mouth sounds when a spotlight passes their face, then making sounds collaboratively, trying to emulate a Bob Dylan song heard on tape, lipsyncing “O Canada,” telling jokes, listening to the wall, all in the familiar stop-and-start style from the airplane segment. These are Nam June Paik, Annette Michelson, Bob Cowan, Helene Kaplan, Yoko Orimoto.

16: Hands are manipulating each item on a desk full of objects and a voice is breathlessly narrating the hands’ actions. It seems the voice is seeing what we see and trying to keep up, but then the voice catches up and gets ahead, so it seems the hands are following the voice’s instructions. The voice falls way behind again, with jumpcuts and blackouts in the image.

Short one, a family watches TV, hysterical laughter is heard, a mic faces an empty chair.

18: Girl looks out cabin window and we hear rain but don’t see any, then a rain-streaked glass is added in the foreground to complete the picture, other elements (including the girl) pop on and off. This is Joyce Wieland.

Three people sit awkwardly in a basement while a British comedy routine about religion plays on soundtrack, the picture cutting to a new lighting and pose when the radio show changes lead speaker.

20: People take turns reading lines, quick fades at end of lines to black or a color field or a strumming guitar. More setups and activity here than usual, I feel like the movie has been creating an alphabet Zorns Lemma-style and I haven’t been learning it. Settles into a one shot-per-spoken syllable rhythm, then mutates again, and again – this one has so many variations it’s like the full film in miniature.

Colored gels waved in front of a woman in bed. “Seeing is believing,” or is it? Double-exposure, a skit where some people conjure a bed (with an editing trick), then destroy a table (with a hammer). The only segment to include a hardcore sex scene, whose sound we only hear later as hands play a piano.

Bearded guy (Sitney) talking in profile, explaining that the onscreen numbers have been counting appearances of the word four/for in the movie, but the man splits into alternate versions of himself and jumbles the count.

Short scenes: empty tin/bell ring/snowy car, then credits/corrections/addenda.

from Snow’s notes:

Control of WAVES OF “COHERENCE” necessary. Rhythm continues but certain elements become more sequential then become more varied again … The entire film an “example” of the difficulty (impossibility) of the essentializing-symbolizing reduction involved in the (Platonic) nature of words in relation to experience (object) etc. discussed. The difference between the reduction absolutely necessary to discuss or even describe the experience and the experience. Each is “real” but each is different.

Regina Cornwell in Snow Seen:

Unlike the descriptive, literal, sometimes punning titles of many of Snow’s works which point to themselves, the title “Rameau’s Nephew” by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen appears to function differently. Denis Diderot, philosopher, editor of the Encyclopédie, art critic, theorist of drama as well as author of several plays and other fiction, was a major intellectual figure of the eighteenth century in France. Dennis Young receives thanks because he gave Snow the copy of Rameau’s Nephew by Diderot. Young was at that time a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Wilma Schoen is a pseudonym: schoen the German word for beautiful, Wilma Schoen an anagram for Michael Snow. Jean Philippe Rameau was a contemporary of Bach and Handel who contributed important theoretical writings on harmony, wrote harpsicord music, operas and opera ballets. He was for a time admired by the French intellectual circle which included Diderot, Rousseau and d’Alembert. And he did have a nephew, a would-be musician and somewhat of a ne’er-do-well named Jean-François Rameau.

Sitney, who’s in the movie, calls it “the most comprehensive, and the most impressive, of the serial films of the seventies … The whole rambling film seems organized around a dizzying nexus of polarities which include picture/sound, script/performance, direction/acting, writing/speaking, and above all word/thing. The film opens with an image of the film-maker whistling into a microphone and ends with a brief shot of a snowdrift, so that the work is bracketed by a rebus for Mike … Snow.”

by ·Comments Off on A Film About a Woman Who… (1974, Yvonne Rainer)

A decade after seeing the doc about her, I’ve finally watched a full Rainer feature. “Dry” is still the word I’d use, though it’s structurally busy and playful.

Four people on a couch are reading slides of the same essay Yvonne is reading us on the soundtrack. The slides also have photographs, and we’ll see silent motion film of some of those photos being posed.

A male narrator takes over but the words are still from a female POV, now with pauses representing missing words, “is it possible that I have really ___, that I will never make ___?” Other times the narration will cut off mid-sentence. Much more eventful than the Akerman movie I watched the night before, but harder to sit through.

“For some reason she is embarrassed about her reverie.” Relationship psychology… starts telling a story of a bad(?) date with brief scenes and numbered intertitles, establishes a rhythm, then one title sticks for a long time and we hear an opera song and the story sidetracks to something new. Things like this keep the movie from ever getting tedious.

Studiously avoids sync sound until halfway through the movie: a woman at a surreal dinner scene gives an entire sync monologue like it’s no big deal, then before we can get used to this she is rudely interrupted by an intertitle and the film goes completely silent. These sorts of ruptures are the rule here. The great DP Babette Mangolte also shot Jeanne Dielman and Hotel Monterey (but not the Akerman I watched this week), and Rameau’s Nephew, which I’d love to add to this thread of 1974 movies if I can find the time, but maybe its four hour play with sound synchronization would be too much coming after this (edit: it was).

It incorporates retakes and loops, silences and blackouts, and the slowest-motion stripping you’ve ever seen. Ends on piano music and dance poses, then a brief cycle of violence via intertitles at the beach but I never figured out its structure or momentum, it could’ve ended on anything.

by ·Comments Off on Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974, Chantal Akerman)

Chantal/Elle spends a month alone in a plain apartment eating spoonfuls of sugar out of the bag. Voiceover narrates the action, but not exactly, and not in sync with what we’re seeing (messing with sound sync was all the rage in 1974). The first sync dialogue comes after an hour, when she’s left the house and is riding around with a trucker. I would not have guessed it’d end in an extended sex scene, probably with the ex she was mourning while eating all that sugar. Feels far more electric than the depopulated Hotel Monterey.

Trucker Niels Arestrup was also in Stavisky this year, went on to collect awards for playing in Audiard movies (lead prison gangster in A Prophet), and the girl at the end, Claire Wauthion, was in La Mémoire Courte.

by ·Comments Off on Little Murders (1971, Alan Arkin)

By the time Patsy brings her nihilist photographer boyfriend Elliott Gould home to her parents you’ll be thinking “this was obviously based on a play,” but at the same time there’s a happy realization that the characters are going to remain eccentric, untethered to realistic behavior. Of the movies I’ve seen written by cartoonist Jules Feiffer, this was better assembled than the Alain Resnais.

Gould’s girl is Marcia Rodd and her family is: Hoffman’s mom in The Graduate, Mr. Mushnik, and Snowden in Catch-22. Guest stars are brought in to monologue: the director as a cop, the late Donald Sutherland as an existential priest, and Amazon Women‘s Murray as a judge.

Maybe we should’ve seen it coming from the title, or from the movie’s first scene where Gould is being attacked by a street gang, but the story takes a dark turn when Rodd gets randomly killed with a rifle, and city violence becomes the movie’s new main focus, ending with Gould shooting the director (offscreen). Memorial screening for Sutherland, and belatedly/additionally for Arkin.

by ·Comments Off on Fata Morgana (1970, Werner Herzog)

Opens with multiple plane landings from the same angle, almost some Same Player Shoots Again repetition but you can tell they’re different flights from the changing patterns of birds on the ground. The heat-haze over runway connects this to the desert scenes that follow, featuring some beautiful dune photography. Desert cities and very dead animals. A voiceover sometimes breaks in to read some biblical-sounding earth-formation text, which I could do without.

Part two, new narrator and text, not as archaic, plus some nice Leonard Cohen songs, and German researchers with sync audio. And part three, I don’t even know what to tell you. This all starts out as a photography demo, then becomes a collection of eccentricities and natural phenomena – Herzog in a nutshell. Dave Kehr: “Every shot has a double edge of harsh reality and surrealist fantasy.”

Christoph Huber in Cinema Scope 94:

Initially conceived as a sort of science-fiction film, Fata Morgana ended up closer to what today is labelled as an essay film, although it still seems to be rooted firmly in the realm of the fantastic, or even psychedelic. The film’s title is a perfect encapsulation of Herzog’s filmic universe, conjuring a desert mirage that can be filmed, although it does not exist – a reflection of reality, like cinema itself … There’s both a strange beauty and a barren, seemingly eternal sadness to Fata Morgana that bespeaks the ineffable, metaphysical qualities and intensity of experience Herzog tries to wrestle from visible reality.

by ·Comments Off on Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971, Melvin Van Peebles)

Wild pedophiliac opening. Disorienting movie, the repeated lines of dialogue and action both odd. Feels like a cross between a quickie semi-competent crime flick and an advanced experimental film (at least three times I thought of Kenneth Anger). They’ll shoot multiple takes and instead of choosing, just use all of them strung together. The music (by the filmmaker and Earth, Wind & Fire) anxiously stops and starts. Since I am culturally and historically challenged, when I heard the song “C’mon Feet” I realized it must be a blaxploitation parody – but it’s not, this was credited with inventing the genre.

Our guy gets a front seat to some police brutality, snaps and beats two cops half to death. Sweetback is arrested but the locals torch the police car and he takes off. A motorcycle gang makes him duel their boss, a woman with long red hair – offered the choice of weapon, SB suggests fucking. The cops always close behind, at the end he’s injured, on the run for Mexico, the soundtrack chorus chanting “run Sweetback, run motherfucker!”

In the great Criterion essay, Michael Gillespie provides a useful list of films to watch next:

It’s vital to appreciate that not all Black films of the seventies can be adequately labeled as blaxploitation but that many were made possible by the popular cycle, even though they ultimately exceeded the expectations of the industry, critics, and moviegoing public, including Bone (Larry Cohen, 1972), Wattstax (Mel Stuart, 1973), Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn, 1973), The Spook Who Sat by the Door (Ivan Dixon, 1973), Claudine (John Berry, 1974), and Coonskin (Ralph Bakshi, 1974).

by ·Comments Off on Owen Land films (1966-1977)

I’ve seen one short Owen Land film before and wasn’t so high on it, but I’m ever intrigued by the idea of a structural-experimental parody artist, or whatever he was, so I’m checking out everything I can find. All these were credited to George Landow – he changed his name soon afterwards.

Film in Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, etc. (1966)

Approx a one-second loop repeated a couple hundred times. Possibly one of those color reference images. Mekas was a fan. Why add film projector sound when any proper screening (not on a digital file in my living room) would have its own film projector sounds – is that part of the meta nature of the project or was it added during the video transfer?

–
Diploteratology: Bardo Follies (1967)

1. A few-second loop of a boat exiting a tunnel while a person (real? animatronic?) waves on the left side
2. Three porthole views of the same image distributed across a mostly black screen
3. The image begins to get replaced with the bubbly butterfly-wing textures of celluloid melting or dissolving
4. Replacing the porthole views, we get fullscreen strobing freezeframes of the melt-dissolve textures
5. Left/right split-screen of film melts in motion
Fully silent.

–
Remedial Reading Comprehension (1970)

“This is a film about you … not about its maker.” That’s more like it, layers upon layers. A woman dreams a classroom, a man jogs in place in front of a screen of someone jogging, an alarm sounds while we read about phony teaching techniques at a preordained pace, and why not throw in a commercial for pre-cooked rice.

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Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present (1973)

An annoying one – high-contrast images of street scenes, closeups and a trade show, while overlapped sound loops are praising God/Jesus. Pretty short, at least.

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Wide Angle Saxon (1975)

Lively one with usually-sync sound, cutting between all sorts of things. Bible stories, and stories of modern people influenced by bible stories. Repeated outtakes of a reporter self-conscious that he can’t remember Panamanian generals’ names but who keeps pronouncing “junta” with a hard J. A terrified artist pouring red paint on things and people, who gets his own title sequence. “Oh it was a dream” – does this end with the woman from the beginning of Remedial waking up? Were the six years between films all her dream?

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New Improved Institutional Quality (1976)

Woman is giving exam instructions on the soundtrack, and the guy onscreen is following them. The instructions involve writing numbers on a photograph, so the guy goes inside the photograph, writing the numbers with a giant pencil. Then he shrinks further when confronted with a woman inside the picture, nestles in her shoe, and then flies silently through some previous Land films (Film In Which, Remedial). Weird, I would not have got the references if I hadn’t been watching these together.

new improved sprocket holes, edge lettering:

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On The Marriage Broker Joke (1979)

People in panda suits introduce versions of films about the marriage broker joke, which it sort of eventually gets around to telling. Marketing discussion with an offscreen speaker doing a bad Japanese stereotype accent. Ends with more religion stuff. The onscreen text was probably meant to be readable, but my video copy is horrendous. Rosenbaum called it an “obscure blend of deconstructive slapstick and various issues arising from his then-recent conversion to fundamentalist Christianity”

P. Adams Sitney in Artforum:

From the start, Land was unique in his subjects and in his relationship to the processes of filmmaking. Television, advertisements, linguistic confusions were the materials of his first films, and they remained his favorite subjects. Above all he used cinema as a means to explore the illusory nature of images.

He had no scruples about mercilessly making fun of his fellow filmmakers (and of me) so long as he prominently mocked himself and his own works, as he did with wry humor in films such as New Improved Institutional Quality and On the Marriage Broker Joke. His religious convictions never dispelled his fascination with the absurdities of human behavior. The drives for possessions, certitude, beauty, sex, money, and food — especially sex — make Land’s fictive humans ridiculous, confused, and devious. His ability to invent and to people his films with memorably ridiculous characters was unmatched, even by the late George Kuchar, among American avant-garde filmmakers.

Land:

I… developed the technique of fabricating fantastic stories about myself and relating them in a perfectly deadpan manner so as to convince my hearers of their authenticity. This was not done maliciously, but out of a sense of the absurdity of all phenomena and the arbitrariness of all information. This may be a form of poetry, which in Greek means making—as in “making it up.” Usually it is called “lying.”